ECB to Regularly Publish New Wage Tracker Indicators Following Monetary Policy Meetings

18 December 2024

By Marta Vilar – MADRID (Econostream) – The European Central Bank will publish a new set of wage tracker indicators at 10:00 CET on Wednesdays the week after each monetary policy meeting of the Governing Council, the ECB said on Wednesday.

In a blog post published on the ECB website, the institution introduced the new wage tracker gauge, which it said ‘uses granular data from collective bargaining agreements – that means it collects and aggregates information from thousands of these agreements between trade unions and employer associations, contract by contract’.

In a press release, the ECB said the new wage tracker includes four indicators.

The headline indicator ‘is a tracker of negotiated wage growth that includes collectively agreed one-off payments’, while a second indicator excludes one-off payments and ‘reflects the extent of structural (or permanent) negotiated wage increases’, the ECB said.

A third indicators includes unsmoothed one-off payments and is elaborated ‘using a methodology that is conceptually similar to the one used for the ECB’s indicator of negotiated wage growth’, according to the release.

The data set will also include the share of employees covered by the ECB wage tracker in the countries which participate in the collection of data, namely Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria.

The national central banks of the mentioned countries participate jointly with the ECB in the elaboration of these indicators.

Despite the set of data not being a ‘forecast tool’, the ECB said in the blog post that it can be used to ‘monitor and anticipate wage pressures’, and will be timelier than other indicators on the same matter.

As to the results of the first ECB wage tracker, also published today, it ‘suggests negotiated wage pressures will ease overall in 2025 compared with 2024’, according to the press release.

The headline wage tracker ‘currently points to strong negotiated wage growth of 4.7% in 2024 (based on an average coverage of 47.4% of employees in participating countries), easing to 3.2% in 2025 (based on an average coverage of 32%)’, the ECB said.

A monthly peak was projected by this indicator in December 2024 at 5.4%, the highest level since the first collection of data in January 2023, the ECB said.